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Sharewatch: Banks weakness has strong points

BANK OF IRELAND’S directors deserve a grilling when they meet the people who pay their wages at the annual shareholder meeting this week. The degree to which expectations among shareholders have been lowered is astonishing.

Bank of Ireland has been suffering a credibility problem since Michael Soden rode into town to take over the reins from Maurice Keane in 2002.

One of his first public airings was thinking out loud about the virtues of a merger with arch-rival AIB. That went down like a loan refusal from your bank manager. Next up was the aborted merger attempt with Abbey National, a hastily contrived move that caught too many influential people offside to make it workable.

Ever since then it has been one long downhill ride for the bank and the share price tells its own story. The flip side of the weak share performance is a nice, fat dividend. That,